Worth noting too something out of the Guardian report: the Catalan Republican Left party is also key, more than in Madrid because they hold all the decisive seats (not just 8 out of 12 as in the national parliament), of the coalition supporting Socialist Pasqual Maragall as president of the autonomous community of Catalonia, the relevant regions whose capital is Barcelona.

So they have quite a leverage over Zapatero: if they break up, he and his party might even lose both the national and the Catalan government, a country’s key region.

Whatever happens next, many in Madrid as well as the Basque country think the 25-year-old statute on the regions must now change. Mr Ibarretxe has asked a parliamentary commission to negotiate a new statute, as it did in 1979. Mariano Rajoy, the PP leader, called his plan “the biggest challenge to national unity since 1978”. Even the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, said it was secessionist, unconstitutional and incompatible with a Europe seeking to give up frontiers. He has ruled out government-to-government negotiations.